Sept. 11, 2012

[Trilby]

Usually I'm not big on this kind of thing but the weather this morning is REALLY reminding me of 9/11/2001. It's a beautiful blue out with a hint of crisp and the sun is shining so prettily.

I recall eleven years ago - I stopped on my way to work to get gas, I remember what color uniform I was wearing (seafoam green) and I went into my office. at nine o'clock the sec. came in to tell me one of the steel workers had told her we'd better turn on the TV. We did. We didn't see another patient all the rest of that day. we were glued to the tv. When the towers came down, I felt a sadness like a leaden cloak and a darkness I've never felt before or since.

I think of all the lives lost to this - the victims, the soldiers, the civilians caught in a cruel land with unsustainable laws and policies against women, I think of what I was doing and where I THOUGHT my life was heading. Sept. 11 changed my life. Shortly afterward, I quit the fabulous job I had, then I quit nursing altogether and went back to college to study what I had always wanted to study which is a useless sort of thing and I'm not really good at it anyway but I did it. (Don't ask me a grammar question. You're supposed to learn those in grade school and I was absent that day)

I'm surprised that on the TODAY show they are carrying on as usual with all the same shit/different day sort of mashup. I thought they'd be doing some sort of anniversary type thing.

I feel sad. The weather is perfect - just like that day. This is probably the first time a beautiful day has made me sad.

[infinite monkey]

I hear you. One beautiful morning...out of seemingly nowhere.

Thanks TrilBri. That was an important post.

[glatt]

Sometimes I wonder where we would be now if September 11th hadn't happened. It's been such a bad dream since then. I'm amazed at what we've done to ourselves in response to that day.

But the reality is that this is where we are. Wishing isn't productive.

I made a point last night of putting the flag by the front door so we would see it this morning and not forget to fly it today. I'm not sure what it means, but seeing it flying pleased me this morning. My daughter put it up before I came downstairs.

[Gravdigr]

Never forget.

[Lamplighter]

Not surprisingly, my feelings from 2010 haven't changed

I'm still sad for the people and things we lost in 2001,
but more so in the ways we have allowed our country change.

[Beest]

A book I read recently talked about the '90s as the time between when the Wall fell and the Towers, i thought that was an interetsing bracketing of time and how different things were before and since. I'll try and dig it out and quote it

[Big Sarge]

Too many have forgotten that day & what it meant. I gave up a marriage and family to defend our country. Too many fuckers sit on there ass and don't remember.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I doubt it, everyone remembers where they were when they heard about it, like the Kennedy assassination.
I agree with Glatt and Lamplighter. What we've done to ourselves since then is even sadder.

[tw]

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration's initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective -- a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared "mission accomplished," with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda's leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied. ...

Bin Laden had nothing to do with fostering these misconceptions. None of this had any real connection to 9/11. There was no group known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" at that time. But the political climate of the moment overcame whatever flaccid opposition there was to invading Iraq, and the United States marched into a second theater of war, one that would prove far more intractable and painful and draining than its supporters had envisioned.

Classic overreaction that every informed American should remember on every 11 September. Too many still want to respond as extremists rather than learn from mistakes. A fundamental difference between a moderate and an extremist.

See those empty stores in malls? Those abandoned homes? So many unemployeed because recessions occur maybe seven years after a war inspired by lies? Trophies to an overreaction that bin Laden so successfully inspired. Too many of us failed to learn from history (Deja Vue Nam).

We will make the same mistake in another 30 years because too many will again patronize extermists and their destructive overreactions. Those who really learned from 11 September now appreciate how bin Laden so successfully got us to so seriously harm ourselves.

[BrianR]

I remember, and I shall never forget.

I was on active duty at the time.

[jimhelm]

I was I a hotel in ocean city md. I had just come back from sneaking a cigarette.

[Undertoad]

It's the tw drinking game!

Originally Posted by tw

Classic .... ourselves.

Drink every time tw quotes more than two paragraphs of himself to point out that he was right pat himself on the back.

You must drink

Deja Vue Nam

Drink every time tw uses "Vue" instead of "Vu" in the common phrase "Deja vu".

You must drink

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Drink every time tw quotes more than two paragraphs of himself to point out that he was right pat himself on the back.

Apparently you did not read Lamplighter's post. Who, in turn, quoted Ted Koppel.

You cannot tell the difference between what I posted and what highly respected professionals wrote? Drinking too much distorts perception. Too much Kool-Aid.